The following year I suddenly married a soldier, the only young man I
knew, and I knew him very slightly, and went out to India with him. I
did not forget Aunt Emmy, we corresponded regularly; but I was young
and my life was a very full one. I had seen nothing of the world till I
married. I had a child. The years rushed past, joyful, miserable, vivid,
surprising, happy years, in spite of the fact that my husband was not
remarkably like Lord K----in appearance, and not in the least like the
"plaister saint" with whom I had hurried to the altar on such slight
provocation.
During these years Uncle Thomas died, and Uncle Tom married, and Aunt
Emmy wrote to me that she had taken a little cottage in Abinger Forest
against her brother's advice, and how, in spite of his opposition--how
much it must have cost her to oppose him--he had forgiven her and
presented her with the most expensive mahogany bedstead and bedding that
Maple could supply--"so like him."
I wondered vaguely once or twice whether there had been any question of
her marrying Mr. Kingston, but there was no mention of him in her
letters, and I did not like to ask. I knew that she was very poor, but
presently my heart was gladdened by hearing from her that a distant
relation had left her a legacy, and that she was now comfortably off.
Then suddenly our life was darkened. Our child died. I struggled with
my grief, became ill, and was sent home. Aunt Emmy urged me to go
straight to her. She and Uncle Tom were my only near relations in
England. He also offered to take me in for a time. He wrote with real
kindness. He had a child himself. And his wife wrote too. But I need
hardly say that I took my sore heart and my broken health straight to
Aunt Emmy.
It was late in August when I arrived. The honeysuckle was still in bloom
on Aunt Emmy's white cottage, standing in its little orchard in a
clearing in the forest. She was waiting for me in the porch, and I ran
feebly to her up the narrow brick path between the tall clumps of
hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies; and she drew me into the little
parlour and held me closely to her. And the years rolled away, and I was
a child again, and she was comforting me for my broken doll.
With the egotism of youth I fear I had not given a thought to Aunt
Emmy's new home until I entered it. I knew that she was happy in it, and
that it had once been a gamekeeper's cottage, but that was about all.
Nowadays every one has a cottage--it is the fashion; and literary men
and women, tired of adulatory crowds, weary of their own greatness, flee
from the metropolis, and write exquisite articles about their gardens,
and the peace that lurks under a thatched roof, and the simple life,
lived far from shrilling crowds but near to nature, and _very_ near to
the Deity. Fortunate Deity!
But in the days of which I am writing cottages and their floral and
spiritual appurtenances were not the rage.
I never realised until I saw Aunt Emmy in a home of her own how much
taste she possessed, or how pretty a cottage could be. It did not try to
look like a house. It was just a cottage, standing amid its apple-trees,
now red with apples, with its old well half hidden in clumps of
lavender. The little dwelling itself, with its low ceilings and long oak
beams and dim colouring and quaint furniture, had a certain austere
charm, a quiet dignity of its own. The sunny air came softly in through
wide-open latticed windows, bringing with it the scent of mignonette.
There had never been a breath of air in the house in Pembridge Square.
_Ole Scorpio_, that friend of my youth, looked peaceful and complacent
in a little recess in which his soft colouring and perfect figure showed
to great advantage against a white-washed wall in shadow.
Aunt Emmy herself, in a gown of some dull white material, with a little
grey in her rippling, parted hair, seemed at home for the first time in
her life. She looked a shade older, a shade thinner in the face, her
sweet eyes a little sunk inwards. But her tall figure had retained all
its old soft dignity and beauty of line. Looking at her as she poured
out my tea for me, I suddenly felt years older than she.
This bewildering impression deepened as the days went on, and a
protecting, wondering compassion became part of my affection for her.
During the years I had spent in India I had seen a good deal of both
sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the
throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand
the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien
strands, had marvelled and been dismayed, had marvelled and been awed,
had seen the dye of my own blood on one dim thread, the gold of my own
joy on another. The sheltered life had not been mine.
But Aunt Emmy had not moved mentally by a hair's-breadth. All her
expansion, if expansion it could be called, had taken form in her house
and garden. I had not been a week under her roof before I found that Mr.
Kingston occupied exactly the same position in her life as he had done
in Pembridge Square. She had brought down her romance to adorn her new
home just as she had brought down _Ole Scorpio_, in cotton wool. Each
had their niche. Perhaps it was unreasonable in me to expect to find her
different. I had not expected it. But I had become such a totally
different person myself that her attitude to life, which had appeared to
me so romantic and natural when I was eighteen, now appeared
irremediably pathetic, visionary, out of touch with reality. Perhaps,
however, it was I who had become disillusioned and matter-of-fact. I saw
with a kind of pitying wonder that her youthful romance still supplied
to her, as it had done since she was nineteen, a certain atmosphere of
pensive, prayerful resignation, a background for ethereal day-dreams.
Her peaceful days were passed in a kind of picturesque haze, like the
mist that, seeming in itself a rosy light, sometimes veils a tranquil
September sunset.
She was evidently very happy, but it was equally evident that she did
not know it. From words she let drop now and then I saw that she still
imagined she was bearing the heavy cross of her mutilated youth. But to
me it seemed as if some tender hand had lifted it from her shoulder.
"Aunt Emmy," I said, yielding to an ignoble curiosity in the second week
of my visit, as we were picking the lavender together, "when Uncle
Thomas died, I had thought I should hear of your marrying Mr. Kingston."
"I also hoped it, my dear," said Aunt Emmy, snipping the lavender into a
little basket, held in a loose white-gloved hand.